A VOICE FROM THE CELL

Hardback. Published in Italy under the title 'Memoriale dal Carcere'. Tr. from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun. From this extraordinary document - written in prison by the author as a defence in his own trial for murder - there emerges an appallingly convincing picture of the frustration, the pride, the jealousy and the absurdity of Sicilian petit-bourgeois life. The narrator becomes involved with a large and unscrupulous family, the Armoni, through the marriage of his sister to one of their sons. The clan, headed by the mother - a figure of radiating evil - extort money from him with hypocritical arrogance while treating his sister as a servant. Montalto is terrified into deeper and more squalid humiliations, all of which he endures, so he says, for love of his sister. To help her he himself marries one of the Armoni daughters, but far from improving matters this only makes them very much worse. The book holds the attention straight away, with mounting horror built on human duplicity, meanness and hatred, animal savagery and weakness. 127pp. small 8vo. h/back. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. With tiny label to fpd, very lightly foxed, o/w Vg+ in sunned pcdw Vg. dw.